Gendered Autobiography

GENDERED AUTOBIOGRAPHY: “RECORD” AND “INQUIRY”

A Comparative Reading of the Memoirs of Edward Said and Jean Said Makdisi

Hala Kamal

This paper attempts to present a comparative feminist reading, informed by autobiography

theory, of the memoirs of brother and sister, Edward W. Said and Jean Said Makdisi. The choice,

here, of the two texts, Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir (1999) and Jean Said Makdisi’s

Teta, Mother and Me: An Arab Woman’s Memoir (2005), reflects several theoretical concerns,

and attempts to explore the different motives behind writing a memoir, and consequently, the

choice of self-representation, in the light of theories of autobiography. This paper, therefore,

attempts answering the following questions: How different are the driving forces which

motivated both Edward Said and Jean Said Makdisi to write their memoirs? What are their

perceptions regarding the “uses of autobiography”?1 What is the power these memoirs carry in

the socio-political context?

It is worth noting, at the outset, that my reading is directed by several theoretical

assumptions: autobiography as a form of self-representation is gendered, and there are,

consequently, marked differences between men’s and women’s writing, not based on an

essentialist notion of masculinity and femininity, but as a reflection of experiential variation;

autobiography writing is a process of self-representation, and should not, therefore, be read and

judged according to its “referentiality”;2 and the process of writing involves the existence of an

implicit readership, and hence, involves a “political dimension.”3 Thus, methodologically, this

paper follows a feminist approach, comparing the memoirs of brother and sister,4 as a case in

point, to clarify that the most critical element in auto/bio/graphy is not the “bio” or life, but

actually the process of writing (“graphy”), as mediated by the author.

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This paper is, therefore, divided into three parts. In the first part, I wish to begin by

referring to two key concepts governing my reading of the memoirs; namely, the difference

between women’s autobiographical writing and mainstream men’s autobiography; as well as the

epistemological specificity of “memoir” within autobiography theory. In the second part I will

explore the two texts in terms of motivation, and will then consider Edward Said’s and Jean Said

Makdisi’s perceptions of the power of writing and self-representation. The third part of the paper

will include reflections on the two texts in the light of the notion of “uses of autobiography”.

Gendered Memoirs:

In her study of women’s autobiographies, Estelle Jelinek has paved the path for the rise of

feminist autobiography theory. In her ground-breaking article, “Women’s Autobiography and the

Male Tradition,” she offers a paradigm differentiating autobiographies written by men from those

written by women. In her discussion of “the male tradition,” she relies on the criteria specified in

traditional autobiography criticism; while her own reading of women’s autobiographies informs

her contribution as to the features characterizing the women’s tradition of autobiography.5

In her comparative gender-oriented study of autobiography, “Women’s Autobiography

and the Male Tradition,” Jelinek maintains that men’s autobiographies differ from those written

by women, as summarized in the following features of both content and form. First,

autobiography (i.e., male autobiography) focuses on the author’s position in the public sphere, his

career and life in the wider socio-political and historical context, and is “representative of his

times, a mirror of his era” (7). Second, men tend to write autobiographies which “may

exaggerate, mythologize, or monumentalize their boyhood and their entire lives” (14); they also

portray “their lives as heroic,” and tend to represent themselves in “a self-image of confidence”

(15). Third, in terms of form, autobiography critics contend that (male) autobiographers follow a

Gendered Autobiography

chronological narrative structure, “concentrating on one period of their life, one theme, or one

characteristic of their personality” with the intention to “consciously shape their life into a

coherent whole” (17).

On the contrary, in her reading of women’s autobiographies, Jelinek argues, first, that the

focus is on the personal and private aspects of the autobiographer’s life, particularly in relation to

other people in her life, highlighting “domestic details, family difficulties, close friends, and

especially people who influenced them” (8).6 Second, women’s autobiographical self-images

reveal their “self-consciousness and need to sift through their lives for explanation and

understanding,” motivated by their desire “to clarify, to affirm, and to authenticate their self-

image” (15). Thus, women’s autobiographies can be seen as a means for self-expression, seeking

recognition and acknowledgement rather than grandeur. Third, women’s autobiographical

accounts are marked by “irregularity” and instead of following a linear structure, are usually

“disconnected, fragmentary, or organized into self-sustained units” (17).

In her landmark book, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography (1986), while not

claiming to offer a “feminist history” of autobiography, Jelinek focuses on the “literary

characteristics of the autobiographies” in terms of “content”, “narrative forms,” and “self-image”

(Tradition xi). She traces the development of autobiography in the West in the following lines:

It is only since World War II that autobiography has been considered a

legitimate genre worthy of formal study. Before then, autobiographies were

considered of interest almost exclusively for the information they provided

about the lives of their authors … Most criticism concentrated on British and

Continental autobiographies of famous men whose private lives were a source

of curiosity. (Jelinek, Tradition 1, emphasis added)

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Although these lines imply the rise of new trends in autobiography criticism since the middle of

the twentieth century, Jelinek exposes both genre and gender limitations. Traditional

autobiography writing was concerned with revealing the “private lives” of “famous men”; and

similarly, mainstream critical attention was directed towards the “lives” of those “men.” This

quotation, hence, raises two problematic issues; namely, the focus on the presentation rather than

the representation of the self, and the predominant marginalization of women in critical inquiries.

A considerable amount of research has been carried out in the past few decades, revising

traditional notions of male authority and authorship, as well as redressing the processes of

silencing and absenting women.

It is also worth pointing out in this context that the focus of feminist autobiography theory

is generic as well as gender-oriented. In their Introduction to Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s

Autobiography, Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck highlight this connection, stating that

“Autobiography localizes the very program of much feminist theory – the reclaiming of the

female subject – even as it foregrounds the central issue of contemporary critical thought – the

problematic status of the self” (1-2). Thus, the “self” becomes the agent of biographical

representation. Yet, identity theory (which does not come full-force within the scope of this

paper) views autobiography “as a site of identity production” (Gilmore 14), and Betty Bergland

further problematises the autobiographical self by seeing her/him “as socially and historically

constructed and multiply positioned in complex worlds and discourses” (Bergland 131), and sets

a paradigm of the multiple shifting positions of the author as person, narrator and character (143).

In his widely-cited article “Autobiography and Historical Consciousness,” Karl J.

Weintraub argues that autobiography emerged as a distinct genre with the development of a

historical sense. Regarding the term “autobiography” etymologically, Weintraub defines all

autobiographical writing in terms of the “inward absorption and reflection” on external reality as

Gendered Autobiography

mediated through personal experience. Moreover, stating that the differentiation of memoir from

autobiography cannot be “a tight and definitive one,” he points out that the memoirist “records

the memories of significant happenings,” with emphasis on momentous events rather than

personal characteristics (822-823). A memoir is further distinguished from a diary which

“attributes prime significance to the segments of life” (827).

Unlike Weintraub, whose definitions of various forms of autobiographical writing are

conditioned by the content itself, Margo Culley considers memoirs, foremost, as narrative forms;

and thus distinguishes them from fictional narratives, as well as from other forms of

autobiographical writing such as diaries and letters. She argues that the difference is marked

mainly by the temporal point of writing, as memoirs are written at a fixed moment in the present

during which the memoirist reflects on the past. Weintraub focuses on the temporal and spatial

point of view, and seems to consider the choice of the moment of writing in terms of its

significance in the memoirist’s life, and the power of “retrospective interpretation” in making the

past “intelligible and meaningful in terms of the present understanding” (826). Culley, on the

other hand, stresses the temporal perspective, in the sense of its proximity and distance from the

events remembered and recorded. Thus, she is more concerned with the machinations of

consciousness, and the process of “selecting details to create a persona” (12). I wish to argue,

however, that the most significant aspect of the term “memoir” lies in the fact that it implies

foregrounding the process of memory in self-representation, and consequently highlights the

conscious and subconscious acts of recollection, interpretation and selection.7 It is interesting,

therefore, in reading memoirs, to pursue the moments in the memoirist’s life that direct her/him

from the present to the past and then back again, in terms of reflection and expression.

Hala Kamal

Memoir as “record”

In this part of the paper I wish to explore the critical moment in the life of Edward Said

which directed him towards introspection and self-inscription. I intend to focus here on the

incident in Edward Said’s life which triggered his decision to write his memoir. In his case, the

decision led to immediate involvement in the project, which started in 1994,8 and ended with the

publication of the memoir in 1999. Edward Said’s Preface to Out of Place opens with the

following statement, “Out of Place is a record of an essentially lost or forgotten world. Several

years ago I received what seemed to be a fatal medical diagnosis, and it therefore struck me as

important to leave behind a subjective account of the life I lived” (emphasis added, xi).

These lines connect memoir-writing to death, in the sense of Said’s attempt at resisting

death through writing about his life. To him, the act of writing is an act of capturing life, and

leaving behind an “account” of his educational upbringing. The gradual deterioration of his

health is counter balanced by his desire to reproduce his life, and the parallelism between

intellectual “construction” and physical “degeneration” is most eloquently described in the

following:

These details are important as a way of explaining to myself and to my reader

how the time of this book is intimately tied to the time, phases, ups and downs,

variations in my illness. As I grew weaker, the numbers of infections and bouts

of side effects increased, the more this book was my way of constructing

something in prose while in my physical and emotional life I grappled with

anxieties and pains of degeneration. Both tasks resolved themselves into

details: to write is to get from word to word, to suffer illness is to go through

the infinitesimal steps that take you through from one state to another. (216)

Gendered Autobiography

In addition to highlighting the power of the memoir in resisting death on a personal level, these

lines are significant as they reveal Edward Said’s conscious decision to write, not only for

himself, but for his readers as well. He is trying to “explain” to himself and his “reader” the

connection between his book and his illness. However, reading Out of Place, we hardly encounter

this process of explanation “to himself,” as Edward Said’s tone throughout the memoir is mostly

confident, self-assertive and powerful. The memoir does not reflect his attempts at understanding

and explaining his life, as much as offering “a subjective account,” “translating experiences,”

collected and organized in his memoir, which he describes as having “some validity as an

unofficial personal record” (xiii). Indeed, being an academic and intellectual, Said believes in the

power of words; therefore, instead of potentially leaving his life in the hands of future

biographers, he takes the initiative and power of self-representation in his own hands.

Edward Said is conscious of the process of construction taking place in his writing. He

states in his Preface that the definite reason behind writing his memoir is his need to connect his

past to his present, in the act of “reconstructing a remote time and experience” (xiv), by

collecting fragments of his “history and origins” with the purpose of attempting “to construct

them into order” (6). Like most mainstream autobiographies, Edward Said’s text does not include

moments of questioning, confusion, or discovery; nor does it reveal the process of grappling with

memories, sources, photos and other elements of the past as part of this construction. To Said, the

written text does not expose the memoirist’s struggle with his memory, nor his acknowledgement

of its limitations, but is more celebratory, presenting his final statement and effort “to record the

experiences as a coherent whole” (65). In addition to confirming the mainstream notion of “male

autobiography” as seeking to present a life in a unifying and “coherent whole” (as mentioned in

the previous part of this paper), Said’s description of his own work, here, is also reminiscent of

James Olney’s notion of autobiography as “metaphor of the self,”9 and hence could suggest to us

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viewing Edward Said’s final construct as acquiring monumental dimensions: a self-designed

memorial – the memoir of an intellectual exile.

Memoir as “inquiry”

Unlike Edward Said, Jean Said Makdisi refers to the prolonged duration of time

separating her decision to write and the actual moment of action. Teta, Mother and Me marks a

journey of twists and turns, not only in content, but in the actual conceptualization of the book.

Similar to Edward Said, Jean Said Makdisi’s initial impulse to write is triggered by imminent

death, with the significant difference that in her case, the threat presented itself to her in her

maternal grandmother’s gradual “mental oblivion” and her mother’s widowhood and growing

sense of “emptiness.” Despite being in her prime, Jean Said Makdisi manifests her identification

with her mother and grandmother, and her fear from the “inevitable marginality” imposed on

women, across generations, by oppressive “domestic duties” (10). At the same time, in her

insightful article “Teta, Mother and I,” she expresses her intention to trace the lives of her

grandmother, mother, sisters and herself in “a biographical act of love” (25). Yet the idea which

started as a “biography” soon moves into the realm of historical research, leading Jean Said

Makdisi to an awareness that the “world of women … the domestic life, with all its mysteries and

rituals, could not be separated from the outer life, the world of politics and armies and treaties”

(28). She concludes the same article stating her aim in the following: “I wish to pay homage to

their legacy even while breaking loose from it” (52).

Jean Said Makdisi opens her memoir, Teta, Mother and Me, with a Prelude, which refers

to the immensity of her undertaking, and shares with us her illusions, expectations and intentions.

As we read, it becomes clear that the process of producing the memoir had gone through various

stages, and lived within Jean Said Makdisi for several years – not the months she had anticipated:

Gendered Autobiography

When I started to write this book, I thought that mine would be an easy task.

Glibly, I told my friends I would be done in three months – six, maximum. I

was going to write a loving double biography of my mother and grandmother

from the vantage point of my own unsettling experiences as a modern Arab

woman. The book, I thought, might take fictional or semi-fictional form, and

would be, somehow, like a musical offering, a song of memory and sadness.

That is all…

I had no idea when I began that in tracing my female ancestry I was entering

the cage of history. (9)

These lines mention the long process of writing the book – a process which is triggered by her

grandmother’s health deterioration, leading to her death in 1973; then the urgency of writing

gains force again following her mother’s death (11). However, the idea remains on hold, as Jean

Said Makdisi finds herself caught up in her everyday life experience before and during the war in

Lebanon. This encounter with military-imposed death has pushed her to write an earlier memoir,

Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir (1990), after which she embarks on Teta, Mother and Me.

Apart from the struggle to begin writing, the previous quotation points out the process of

conceptualization involved in the realization of her project. Jean Said Makdisi engages us in her

initial ideas and tentative decisions as to the genre and form of writing. It becomes clear that her

initial impulse was not one of writing an autobiography, but “a loving double biography” of both

her mother and grandmother. Thus, she reveals her wish to express gratitude towards these two

women, as well as to assert her connection to a female family history and tradition. Intending it

as a “fictional or semi-fictional” narrative, the memoirist finds herself grappling with history,

with all its facts and fictions; thus, writing the memoir becomes to her a process of research,

interpretation and representation. The memoir, however, begins to take concrete shape to Jean

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Said Makdisi when her own feminine experience merges with that of her mother and

grandmother.

Read in the light of women’s autobiography theory, Jean Said Makdisi’s connection to

her mother and grandmother, as reflected in the very act of memoir-writing, is marked by what

Mary Mason describes in terms of the “recognition of another consciousness … the grounding of

identity through relation to the chosen other” (22).10

Thus, having relied on her own memories,

her mother’s journal, family letters and photographs, as well as historical facts and documents,

the memoirist expresses her ultimate sense of cross-generational continuity: “And once I saw

how I was related to both, I began to write this book. We have become a family of storytellers

and record-keepers” (18). However, Jean Said Makdisi is aware of the process of writing as

different from the experience of living. In her memoir, she gives voice to her mother by quoting

her journal extensively, and emphasizing the fact that reflection on life experience is a discovery,

while the reconstruction of the past is a rediscovery (247-248).

Jean Said Makdisi, refers subtly to the power of self-representation. By urging her mother

to write a journal, by reading both official and unofficial historical documents, by tracing her

grandmother’s life, by stressing the cross-generational continuum, and by committing herself to

the memoir, the memoirist demonstrates her awareness of the importance of personal accounts in

relation to history. In her attempt to resist the imposed marginality on women, and in her effort to

give voice to her mother and grandmother, Jean Said Makdisi, retrieves them from invisibility.

Thus, Teta, Mother and Me emerges as a feminist text: it places women center stage; it reflects

women’s bondage and shared experiences; it gives women voice and retrieves them from

oblivion; it highlights women’s agency by revealing their hidden roles in society, and through

self-representation.

Gendered Autobiography

Generically speaking, the text is not a typical autobiography, as it is composed of a

variety of intersecting narrative forms, most prominent of which are autobiography, biography

and history:

This book began steeped in a felt reality, as a direct inquiry into my mother’s,

my grandmother’s and my own womanhood… I was a young mother when I

began to think about this project; I am now a Teta to a new generation.

As I read and worked, I arrived at a complex re-reading of the condition of

women, not a simplifying one. (emphasis added, 397)

Being a feminist herself, Jean Said Makdisi perceives of the memoir in terms of a process of

reading and re-reading – exploration and interpretation. It is the manifestation of a feminist

“inquiry” into the experience of womanhood across three generations; and by telling the stories

of her mother’s and grandmother’s lives, Jean Said Makdisi inscribes her own life-story within

women’s history. Thus, the “Arab Woman” who appears in the subtitle, qualifying the “Memoir,”

can be seen as referring to Jean, Mother and Teta, each independently in her own right, or as

representatives of their contemporary Arab women.

Reflections on the Use of Memoirs

The history of autobiography criticism proves that autobiography has always occupied an

ambiguous position in relation to history, philosophy, psychology and fiction. In his study, The

Forms of Autobiography (1980), William C. Spengemann states that autobiographical content

manifests itself in several forms: “Historical self-explanation, philosophical self-scrutiny, poetic

self-expression, and poetic self-invention” (xvi). In the more recent context of theoretical inquiry,

autobiography does not simply permeate (as envisioned by earlier autobiography historians), but

“explodes disciplinary boundaries and requires an understanding of other approaches, methods

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and practices.”11

Trev Broughton goes as far as stating that autobiography is to her “a resource

for feminist enquiry, as a tool for feminist pedagogy, and an engine of feminist change” (244). In

her exploration of “the uses of autobiography,” Julia Swindells explains the ways in which

autobiography contributes to various disciplines, such as empirical history, cultural history,

anthropology, education, law, psychoanalysis, theatre and women’s studies; and calls for

activating autobiography for political empowerment and social change (9-11).

Reflecting on the memoirs of Edward Said and Jean Said Makdisi, I can recognize the

memoirists’ intellectual awareness of the power of autobiographical texts. In the case of Edward

Said, Out of Place emerges as a revelation of intellectual development, a celebration of

achievements in the face of challenging circumstances of upbringing, education and political

reality. Yet, it goes, furthermore, hand in hand with Said’s life-long mission and intellectual role,

rooted in his personal Palestinian experience, in exposing colonial exploitation and imperialist

domination in the East/West encounters.12

Nadia Gindi concludes her article “On the Margins of

a Memoir” stating that “Edward Said has found a ‘homeland’ in the act of writing” (298) – a

statement confirmed and further elaborated by Edward Said himself in his article on “The Public

Roles of Writers and Intellectuals” where he, in turn, concludes “with the thought that the

intellectual’s provisional home is the domain of an exigent, resistant, intransigent art” (144).

Thus, Out of Place, in my mind, takes a form of autobiography, yet transcends the boundaries of

traditional self-assertion and heroism. It carries the weight of a historical document, the power of

self-representation, as well as the authority of cultural studies, post-colonial research, exile and

identity theory.

Jean Said Makdisi’s memoir, similarly, invites more than interest in a woman’s family

chronicle. It presents and represents the intertwined life-stories of three generations of women;

retrieving Teta and Mother from oblivion, highlighting the sense of continuity as to women’s

Gendered Autobiography

predicament imposed by the burden of femininity across history and geography, critiquing

modernity, and asserting women’s agency. Structurally speaking, Teta, Mother and Me reflects

its content: fragments of life-stories, historical accounts, changing politics and geographies,

multiple voices coming together – though far from aspiring to a unifying “coherent whole.” The

forte of Jean Said Makdisi’s memoir lies in its power as a woman’s narrative that delves into the

past and inquires the present. It is, moreover, a feminist document that rereads and rewrites the

history of women; and counters the misrepresentation and stereotyping of Arab women – an

effort particularly significant in the present historical moment.13

Teta, Mother and Me is a

celebration of, and testament to, women’s invisible contribution to history. Apart from its

momentous content, the text generically merges autobiography, biography, history, and fiction, in

addition to its potential for further consideration and scholarship in cultural and women’s studies.

Both Edward Said and Jean Said Makdisi write their memoirs addressing a readership. By

choosing to write their own stories, instead of leaving the initiative in the hands of future

biographers, they implicitly acknowledge the pitfalls of misrepresentation, and take the power of

self-representation in their own hands: Edward Said presenting his life within the contemporary

history of the Middle East; Jean Said Makdisi contributing to women’s autobiography and

history. Reading their memoirs, in juxtaposition, concretizes the gendered aspect of

autobiography, while looking at their memoirs from a distance – both emerge as honest

intellectuals standing up to their public roles.

Hala Kamal

Notes

1 The notion of “uses of autobiography” is derived from Julia Swindells, ed., The Uses of

Autobiography (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995).

2 In her article, entitled “Creating a Tradition,” Françoise Lionnet argues against reading

autobiography in terms of its truth value, and states that “To raise the question of referentiality

and ask whether the text points to an individual existence beyond the pages of the book is to

distort the picture” (91).

3 In her “Conclusion: Autobiography and the Politics of ‘The Personal,’” Julia Swindells uses the

“political dimension” of autobiography in relation to the idea that autobiography often carries an

oppositional or radical message (205).

4 In her comparative book review of Out Of Place and Teta, Mother and Me, among others,

Fayza Hassan poses the question: “Can the memory of the same events, shared by two siblings,

really be so different”?

5 Jelinek establishes a “tradition” of women’s autobiography in her subsequent monumental book

The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography (1986).

6 Jelinek traces the content of several prominent women’s autobiographies, including pioneering

feminist activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as well as novelists and writers such as

Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton among others. She reaches the conclusion that even women

who have played a significant role in the public sphere, tend to refer humorously and “obliquely

to their careers” (“Women’s Autobiography” 8-10).

7 Memory Theory highlights the workings of memory in terms of the conscious and subconscious

processes, such as remembering, forgetting, and transforming events of the past, on both the

Gendered Autobiography

mental and psychological levels. See for example: Martin A. Conway, Autobiographical

Memory: An Introduction (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1990).

8 Edward Said states: “In May 1994 I began work on this book.” Out of Place, 216.

9 James Olney argues that autobiography marks man’s desire to impose order, and consequently

takes various generic manifestations.

10 Mary Mason points out women autobiographers’ tendency to define themselves in relation to

others. For more on the particular notion of cross-generational matrilineal continuity, see Nancy

Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender

(Berkley: The University of California Press, 1978).

11 In their Introduction to Feminism and Autobiography, the editors are particularly concerned

with autobiography in relation to Women’s Studies and the feminist project.

12 The political power entailed in Out of Place is heightened by the hostile reactions to Said’s

account. In her “personal reading” of Said’s memoir, Nadia Gindi exposes the mendacity of the

attacks launched against Said.

13 In an interview with Jean Said Makdisi, published in the Daily Star, Samia Nassar Melki

highlights Makdisi’s contribution in “reclaiming the past” of Arab women, and states: “For

indeed Makdisi’s book is not just about reminiscences, but a social study carefully charting the

quality of life of the women who came before her.”

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